Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Indian Identity and Jesse "Cab" Renick, Captain of the 1948 U.S. Olympic Basketball Team in London

In London the scoreboard read 65-21 as the final gong
mercifully rang out. Thirteen Frenchmen stood in a line opposite fourteen
Americans watching the Stars and Stripes unfurl and listening to the band play
the Star Spangled Banner. The final notes lingered as the United States’
players rushed forward and carried a six-foot two-inch slightly balding
30-year-old named Jesse Renick off the court on their shoulders, bringing an
end to the 1948 London Olympic basketball tourney, an event which brought the
United States their second basketball gold medal and cemented Renick’s
unique place in history.

Renick (55) shakes hands with a member of the Red Cross.
Or a random Olympic basketball player from 1948. I can't tell.

Or at least it should have cemented
his place. After all, he is one of only three Native American gold medal
winners in all of Olympic history (Billy Mills and Jim Thorpe being the others),
an achievement which has earned him a place in the American Indian Athletic
Hall of Fame. During his playing days, “Point-a-Minute Renick” averaged nearly
twenty points a game for Murray State with a shoot-first, ask-questions-later
style. When he transferred to Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) in 1939,
legendary coach Henry Iba’s slow-it-down style cut Renick’s scoring averages in
half. Renick still managed to stand out, leading the team in scoring and
gaining a reputation as “one of the most colorful players in the country.” He
also became Oklahoma A&M’s first two-time All-American.

After his college career and a day
after Pearl Harbor, Renick enlisted in the Navy. He did not resume his
basketball career until the war was over, when he joined the AAU’s Phillips 66ers. Renick and other AAU players kept
their amateur status by working a nine-to-five company job to earn their
paycheck. The basketball was supposedly secondary, occurring only on nights and
weekends.

Before the NBA was formed in 1949,
the AAU was the leading option for former college basketball stars and there wasn't a better team from the 1940s than the squad sponsored by Phillips
Petroleum. Between 1943 and 1950, the 66ers won eight AAU championships. Bob
Kurland, a seven-footer who out-dueled the legendary George Mikan in college,
was the team’s star, but Renick played Pippen to Kurland’s Jordan (or Kobe to
his Shaq, minus the animosity).

After
earning back-to-back AAU All-American honors, Renick capped off his career by captaining the
1948 American basketball team in London. Upon retirement, he was described as “one
of the most colorful players of all time, with burning speed and consuming love
of competition."

The Phillips 66ers 1948 Squad

Yet you’ve probably never heard of Renick. Even
those who are well aware of the achievements of Billy Mills and Jim Thorpe are often unfamiliar with the details behind Renick’s story. What makes Renick different?

It is possible that Renick was simply a victim of his era, a man who happened
to win his gold medal at a time when basketball remained on the peripheries of
America’s athletic consciousness. If that’s the case, it does not negate the
fact that we should rediscover the accomplishments of a man who was ahead of
his time. However, I suspect there might be more nuance to the explanation of
Renick’s missing legacy.

In recent times, reporters have
documented the steep road faced by Native Americans who wish to excel at the highest
levels of competition. From ESPN’s Dana O’Neil to USA Today’s Greg Boeck to the New
York Times’ Selena Roberts, the general narrative is that Native Americans
athletes today find it difficult to embrace the ethic of individualistic
achievement required to gain fame in mainstream American society. For some Native
American cultures (the Navajos being one oft-cited example), the unity of the
community is considered more important than the success of any one person,
which places pressure on some athletes not to chase the individualistic dreams
of mainstream America. Renick’s story of success simply does not fit that
narrative.

Born in rural Oklahoma in 1917 to a
(in Jesse’s words) “tomato-faced Irishmen” named Miles and a part-Chickasaw,
part-Choctaw woman named Ella, Renick spent most of his childhood devoid of any
specific Indian influence. Renick’s mother died when he was six, and since Ella
made the choice not to teach Jesse the traditional Choctaw or Chickasaw customs
and language, he grew up formed by the same experiences that would shape other
rural Oklahoma farm boys. There was one important difference, though: he still looked like an Indian.

Renick’s youth might be called
“assimilation by circumstance.” While some American Indians (including Thorpe
and Mills) had to go through the often demeaning experience of
culture-eradication that occurred in boarding schools, and others grew up in
the set-apart world of the reservation, Renick went about his life fully
immersed in all the attitudes, behaviors and customs of "mainstream" (or at least rural, white) America.

Perhaps Renick’s situation made
life easier for him. Certainly he didn’t feel guilty for leaving the reservation
because he never set foot on a reservation in the first place. He possessed no formative
American Indian worldview which could be abandoned or compromised. Yet Renick’s Indian identity
was ever-present in his physical features, and he always embraced his Indian ethnicity.

He good-naturedly remembered the comments (now seen as insensitive) of his
college coach Iba who once yelled “Get that Indian out before he shoots us out
of the ball game!” or the nickname of “Chief” given to him by his Olympic
teammates. Newspapers during his playing days often called him “the great
Indian star,” which was not nearly as egregious as the stories that ran in the Albuquerque Journal. There, Renick
coached a local Navajo and Pueblo high school team, inspiring the newspaper to
describe him as “head big chief Renick” whose team of Indians will “be on the
warpath” to face a “Navajo invasion” in an “all-Indian clash.”

Photo from a 1947 LIFE magazine feature on the Phillips 66ers.

In facing such racist undertones, Renick was certainly
not alone. But in his case, such comments and attitudes did not keep him from
playing basketball at the highest levels allowed in American society. Other
Native Americans were not so lucky. In the same decade that Renick was the
captain of the United States Olympic basketball team, American Indian
basketball players such as Suitcase Little (of the Sioux Travelers-Warriors)
were touring the country on ethnically-based barnstorming teams,competing against local squads and coming out
at halftime to perform tribal songs and dances so that the white audience would
be entertained.

Was Suitcase Little “more Indian” than Renick?
Perhaps some would argue that he was. His Indian identity certainly proved to
be a greater obstacle on the way to success in mainstream America. I would
suggest, however, that Renick’s story should not be dismissed as less important.
He clearly defined himself as an Indian, and so did everyone else. The fact
that his experience as an Indian was less hazardous to his pursuit of success
compared with other American Indians should not diminish that fact.At the very least, he represents one
character of many in the multi-layered story of American Indian identity in the
United States.

Pointing out that Renick’s
accomplishments as an American Indian are overlooked should in no way diminish
the attention given to Billy Mills and Jim Thorpe, two athletes whose stories
are captivating and heroic. However, there is no doubt that their legacy
certainly benefits because they spent their
formative years on the reservation or at an Indian boarding school,
experiencing firsthand the clash of cultures that is the stuff of in-depth
investigative reporting today.

When those investigative feature
stories are written, and the history of Native American athletic achievement is
summarized, Renick receives nothing more than a name on a bulleted-list of
“Native American Olympians.” Would it not be more accurate to add nuance to our
explanation of what American Indians have achieved and what they have overcome?
Would it not do more justice to the varied experiences of those who identify as
American Indians today to point out that not all American Indian success
stories fit the “out-of-the-reservation” narrative?

Before his death in 1999 at age
eighty-two, Renick spent the waning years of his life at the Veteran’s Center
in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Stories there circulated about the wheel-chair bound old
man who carried around his Olympic gold medal in a pouch. Renick loved to
surprise visitors by whipping out the medal and dropping it into their hands.
Questions would naturally arise. How did you win this? When did you win this?
What were the games like?

For Renick, the medal went beyond
simply representing personal achievement. “There’s only three Native Americans
who have won a gold medal” he informed a Daily
Ardmoreite reporter.“There’s Jim
Thorpe, who was Sac and Fox; Billy Mills, who was a fighting Sioux; and myself.”

The man who would sometimes call
himself the “tall, bald Chickasaw” and other times the “tall, bald, Choctaw,” felt no need to explain the specifics. He was a Native American, and that was
enough.

NOTE: Research for this article was originally conducted in the process of writing an article titled "Jesse 'Cab' Renick, in Search of an Indian Identity," published in the Spring 2011 edition of Chronicles of Oklahoma.